The Los Angeles Dodgers organization has prided itself on being representative and inclusive of a community from all walks of life, but it was not until November of 2015 that they were led by the franchise’s first African-American manager in Dave Roberts.
“I look at my father here, my mother here and this opportunity presented itself, and I was so focused on talking through things with baseball ops and Josh (Byrnes, senior vice president of baseball operations) and Andrew (Friedman, president of baseball operations) and Farhan (Zaidi, general manager) and ownership, trying to talk about the job that honestly I didn’t realize the magnitude of this in the sense of being the first minority manager of the Dodgers,” Roberts said at his introductory press conference inside the Stadium Club at Dodger Stadium.